Brian Wilson: 1942 - 2025

A guest post from Tom Smucker, author of "Why the Beach Boys Matter"

I’ve been listening to and thinking about the Beach Boys ever since purchasing Beach Boys Party! in 1965 and Pet Sounds in 1966. With one exception: after reading the first Brian Wilson memoir, Wouldn’t It Be Nice in 1991, I quit listening to the Beach Boys and solo Brian. Whatever the manipulated facts in that book may have been, the voice of the narrator was obviously not Brian’s. He had disappeared and Dr. Eugene Landy had tacked his own post-Beach Boys fantasy onto Brian’s life. So I lost interest in all of it for a while.

Yet Brian survived this zombie shrink as he somehow survived the drugs, his father, Charles Manson, and getting dissed by Rolling Stone. The Landy years would end up as an episode, not a finale, allowing Brian and his friends and admirers to shape the conclusion of his career. And also allowing us fans to thrill to the reality that he had teamed up with the Wondermints, performed Pet Sounds live, completed Smile, released a few new songs that stuck, especially one called “Love and Mercy” that was good enough to name the excellent movie for and provided the choral intro to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer. In short, he was able to end up who he really was, an average kid from the lower-middle-class suburb of Hawthorne, California who moved to a nicer part of L.A., had a good and bad life, and was an old guy in his backyard with friends and family singing their songs from the good old days—songs that he wrote because he was also a musical genius.

He also got a redo: the Briany memoir I Am Brian Wilson in 2016, co-authored with novelist Ben Greenman, who also co-authored memoirs with George Clinton, Questlove, and Sly Stone. Like Brian, Sly lasted longer than he was supposed to, created a version of Californian optimism that crashed, reached his own clarity with Greenman, and died the same week as Brian, at 82. Sly and Brian, there’s at least a book-length critical comparison awaiting someone daring enough to try.

Brian would pass on as L.A. was invaded by ICE and the US Marines, a city now viewed as a cultural and political enemy by MAGA, not the celebrated destination of migrating midwestern white people it had been in Brian’s (and my) youth. So we will see how the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson get pulled into or pushed out of this new contested symbolic matrix. The music is important, but so is the story.

“Why The Beach Boys Matter” is available from University of Texas Press.